Chapter Books

I've been trying to follow self-imposed limits on blog reading and writing, something along the lines of, "take a half-hour to check blogs and play spider (not tiger, ahem) solitaire, and then throw in a little laundry, maybe clean the master bedroom or mop a floor, and you'll still have plenty of time to write in the journal, chug some cold water, and enjoy the shady warmth of the deck on a 75-degree sunny morning."  And then, after spending the better part of 20 minutes reading blogs, leaving half a dozen windows open to post comments, I realize, hmmm, maybe the master bedroom doesn't need to be cleaned today.  The laundry's doing just fine in the baskets at the foot of the bed.  I can pick up the kitchen while the kids unwind from school, because it's not as if they ever need my whole-hearted attention after a morning away or anything.  Ha.  No, no, I'll just play solitaire for a few seconds to clear my head.

And then an hour later, I still have to send the neighborhood invite for the Friday playdate and hunt up the checkbook so I can pay our gas bill online, and, well, sitting out on the warm shady deck and writing in the journal will have to wait until next week.  And oh no, I have twenty minutes to make the fifteen-minute drive to preschool and I've had to use the bathroom for the last hour and where is that dog because she needs to get into her crate.

Needless to say (right?), I do not often pick up the kids in a happy mood on days when this has happened.  Blogs and the computer are not, in the parlance, doing it for me.  And you'll notice that I haven't even bothered allotting dissertation time in there, because I want to be marginally realistic.

That's why the blog has been neglected.  When I can gain access to the computer, I'm reading "too many" blogs and playing too much solitaire (no quotation marks necessary) and just generally having a hard time taking care of myself.  I find that the easy thing for me to do with my free time is not always, or even often, the best thing.  I do not seem hardwired to restore my emotional reserves without conscious, even painful, effort.

Even now, I had planned to write a thoughtful little post about the kids' chapter-book habits over the last few months, weaving together some of my reaction to Ames and Ilg's Your Five-Year Old: Sunny and Serene (or maybe more to the point, Your Six-Year Old: Loving and Defiant, which I borrowed now because those books never seem to be available at the library when I want them).  But instead, you're going to get a bit of a laundry list, if you'll excuse the term, because the truth is, on a nice spring day, with the windows open, I like a clean bedroom.  I want all my surfaces to be clutter-free.  There are piles of papers that have been waiting to be filed for months.

Also, the latest round of Scholastic books arrived and I want to enter the titles in LibraryThing.  I'm selfish that way.

In her discussion about TV habits (another one of those topics I'd love to tackle but keep evading), Phantom pointed out that reading can be one area where parents of multiple-birth children catch a huge break.  She's totally right.  During one of our warm, sunny afternoons back in February, the kids and I sat out on our deck for two solid hours, snacking and huddling under beach towels as the sun set, while I read The Trumpet of the Swan.  We finished the book and promptly started reading it all over again.  This really does have to be the height of luxury.

And by the way, I highly recommend The Trumpet of the Swan.  Supposedly it's not E.B. White's best work, but I enjoyed it very much.  There's a little bit of boy/girl language that I eliminated by saying "children" instead of "boys," but in general, it's so much fun to read.  Maybe Gemma and Elba and Wilder especially liked it because they like to camp and splash in lakes.

I do suspect that the kids were probably more inclined to sit still that warm February afternoon for as long as they did because they were not in the best of health.  They were still recovering from the stomach flu, everyone had a cold (when, this year, has everyone not had a cold), and Elba and Wilder were getting ready to get knocked down from pneumonia.  The kids do love to read with me, though.  They know it's the one surefire way to get me sitting still with them.  Reading is easy and fun for me, and easy and fun for them.

This is something I want to emphasize: I genuinely love to read children's books.  I'm far, far, far more excited standing in front of the children's chapter book section of the local book store than I am over the adult fiction shelves.  There are a million great children's books I never read, and another million old favorites I have half-forgotten and can hardly wait to rediscover.  Calder hates reading fiction, adult and children's, and he mostly doesn't do it.  (I force the issue from time to time, so that Wilder doesn't stop being the book-loving little boy he is.)  I think a lot of parents feel like they need to read books for a minimum numbers of minutes a day -- I don't know where they get that idea, it's so bizarre that parents should feel anxious about the hours they spend reading (snort) -- and my point is, I read because I love it.  Other parents love to do other valuable, worthwhile things with their kids that I don't do.  So don't feel guilty because of this post, okay?

In fact, I love books so much, and have rushed to introduce the kids to some of my old favorites with such enthusiasm, I find myself worrying more than a little about depriving the kids of the thrill of discovery for themselves.  We read all the Littles books between December and February, during earlier bouts of illness, because I loved those books so much myself.  I still have three tattered volumes of my own Littles books, bought off Scholastic flyers 25 years ago. And I worried, just a little, because one of the great attractions of the Littles books was their suggestion that if you looked hard enough, at the right time, you might discover a secret world, all around you.  That's a perfectly lovely idea for children, and maybe it's not as wonderful if an adult introduces the books.

I don't ever remember my mom reading to me.  I learned to read just before I entered kindergarten,* so whatever reading Mom and I did together lies in the dim pre-memory years of my past. Mom also didn't monitor my reading habits closely.  She had two smaller children to manage, and was trapped in an unhappy marriage.  Books took me out of the picture, and she certainly wasn't going to mess with that.

Books were secret worlds into which I threw myself.  And I didn't share them with anyone, not even at school.  At school, I raced right through all the primers (we did a rainbow series: does anyone else remember that?) and quickly ended up reading from those boxes of books with their accompanying worksheets full of grammar and comphrension questions.  If anyone ever talked with me about the answers (beyond the endless incomprehensible discussions about adjectives and adverbs, which never made sense until I started studying Spanish), I don't remember it.  After all, a book-loving kid in the classroom is an invitation for the teacher to turn her attention to more pressing needs.

I certainly didn't share books with my parents.

Both my mother and I remember, rather too vividly, a conversation that probably shaped my entire life.  I was about seven years old, and re-reading the Little House books for the second time.  My mom and I did not get along, which is putting it extremely mildy.  Being seven years old and mouthy (oh, was I mouthy), I threw the accusation at her one day that Ma Ingalls never acted the way she did.  My mother said, in a deadly calm voice, "life isn't a Little House book.  That story is a fantasy."

Right at that moment, I decided that someday, I was going to have children and be the best mom ever, just to prove mom wrong.  And honestly, I can't think of any other goal I worked so hard to achieve, or prioritized more, than having children.  But I can't say I've done such a great job with the rest of the plan.

Ah, youth.

Of course, Mom was right.  No one is so preturnaturally calm or accepting as Caroline Ingalls appears to be in all those books.  Of course, Mom was wrong.  It's not fantastic for children to expect their parents to speak calmly, and without anger, from time to time.  Yelling is abusive.  And of course, Mom didn't really know the Ingalls family of the books.  She was thinking of the television show, and the Pa Ingalls of the books had very little to do with Michael Landon.  A child reading those books with a grownup might have, hopefully does have, a very different idea about the happiness of the Ingalls family.

If any of the kids ever compared me in anger to Caroline Ingalls, I'd be able to say, sometime later, after I had dealt with the actual question at hand ("You're upset because I get loud when I get angry.  I don't like it either.  Let's back up and try this conversation again."): "Well, Laura isn't allowed to cry from the time she's four or five years old.  Would you like to live in a world like that?  Do you think children should be seen and not heard?  What do you think it would feel like to sit still at the dinner table and not speak at all unless Daddy or I asked you a question?  I'd rather we shared our emotions and ideas than bottled them up."

But honestly, I wouldn't be able to ask those questions if I hadn't been reading the books with my kids, because I would have forgotten most of that stuff.  (The emotional repression in that family fairly jumps off the page at me now.)  We finished a heavily-edited reading of Little House on the Prairie last week.  I tried starting with Little House in the Big Woods, but the first chapter lovingly, precisely details the slaughter of the family pig, and Gemma freaked right out.  I had to skip entire paragraphs of Indian description in LHOTP and stop to talk about reservations and removal for long, confusing minutes, but at least there were no barrels of pig blood.  (I read the book in spite of a fairly powerful argument about the book's problems.  Make of that what you will.)  We're half-way through On the Banks of Plum Creek now, and it seems to me that this is the least stressful of the three books so far.  Of course, we haven't gotten to the grasshoppers or the blizzards yet, and we've already had an awkward conversation about why they move to South Dakota, which involved skipping ahead to read the first chapter of By the Shores of Silver Lake.  And then there were a bunch of conversations about fevers and blindness.

Hmmm.  Really, I'm starting to wonder why, exactly, I think this chapter-reading stuff is so much fun, so worth writing about....

Well, let's put it this way: the Little House books pose some problems.  Wilder keeps wanting to take the books to bed with him, so he can look at all the covers, and these are the fancy hardcovers my mom gave me for Christmases and Birthdays throughout the 1990s.  Calder keeps making me snort into my milk with sideways observations about the narrative tension: "Oh, no, Pa's gone to town again.  Will he make it back with the sugar?"  But there are a lot of great chapters, and I love watching the kids co-opt storylines for their play.  There's really no practical difference between kids playing Scooby-Doo and playing Laura-and-the-Leeches, but it warms my snobbish heart anyway.

Meanwhile, we abandoned Laura at the creek because I got the next three Betsy-Tacy books out of the library.  I bought myself a hardback reissue of the original Betsy-Tacy back in grad school, and we read it over the course of a day, a few weeks ago.  This is a fantastic read-aloud book for four- to six-year olds, because Betsy and Tacy are, themselves, only five years old for most of the book.  It's a fast read, and almost everything the girls do, could be re-created in pretend play today.  There's a sort of knowing adult narrator that can keep adults entertained, too.

Although, I confess, it did give me pause to get to the matter-of-fact chapter about the death of Tacy's baby sister, Bee.  It's a stark, calm little reminder that authors didn't used to treat childhood death as a Very Special Episode.  It's not even the title of a chapter: it follows right along from Tacy's time spent dying Easter Eggs with Betsy's family, because Tacy's mother and father are too busy attending to Bee.  No, in the world of 1900s and 1940s Minnesota, babies get sick, and there are no antibiotics, and so sometimes, babies die.

After a while, Tacy said, "It smelled like Easter in the church.  Bee looked awful pretty.  She had candles all around her."

"Did she?" asked Betsy.

"But my Momma felt awful bad," said Tacy.

Betsy said nothing.

"Of course," said Tacy," you know that Bee has only gone to Heaven."

"Oh, of course," said Betsy.

But Tacy's lip was shaking.  That made Betsy feel queer.  So she said quickly, "Heaven's awful nice."

"Is it?" asked Tacy, looking toward her.  Her eyes were big and full of trouble.

"Yes," said Betsy. "It's like that sunrise. ... And I'll tell you what tickles Bee.  She knows all about Heaven, and we don't.  She's younger than we are, but she knows something we don't know.  Isn't that funny?  She's just a baby, and she knows more than we do."

"She's a long way from home though," said Tacy.

We'll read up through Betsy-Tacy Go Downtown, and then stop for a few years, because I can't imagine pre-kindergarteners enjoying books about high school that much.  I certainly think it's better to save all the romance talk for the kids to read themselves, when the day comes.

---

Well, I will not be sitting out on the deck this morning, that's for sure, and there will be no piles of folded laundry, but if I rush, I can at least clean up the kitchen.  I've only said a fraction of what I wanted to about the books we've been reading, and there are 25 library books scattered around, waiting their turn in blog-land, too.  Sigh.

I'm just going to close by saying, or maybe bragging, that Wilder loves all these books just as much as the girls do, maybe more.  He's been stopping me during chapters to point to a word and ask what it says.  He wants to see where I'm reading.  And he carefully brings the books to bed at night, to look carefully for the occasional pictures and to study the covers.  The girls aren't readers-in-bed yet, and that's just fine, but I'm always going to have a soft spot for a small child, fighting off sleep, just to look at one more page in his book.

---

* Mom's story had always been that I just "picked reading up."  I pushed her a bit on this a few months ago, and it turns out that my six-year old best friend spent the summer after first grade "playing school" with me.  We would haul this tiny wooden table and two chairs out into the backyard, and my friend would play teacher, walking me through words.  This makes perfect developmental sense -- my friend just finished first grade, so she had just figured out reading, and six-year olds apparently tend to play school naturally.  But it rather blows apart the whole "you just figured it out on your own because you were brilliant" theory, doesn't it.

Comments

[Leggy]

I can very much relate to the "well, I'll just do this for a little while" and then 4 hours have gone by and the laundry's not folded or work is not done. If you find any strategies that work for you, let me know.

My mother gave me the Little House books for Christmas as I lost my childhood copies in a flood. I've read a little of LHBW to my son, but was also surprised at how violent parts of it are. He doesn't seem interested in chapter books yet (he's a month younger than yours)because he doesn't like the lack of pictures.

[carosgram]

I don't have a computer at home because I know I would get lost in it. I do have one at work and spend time reading blogs there. At home I get lost in books. I never liked housework and any excuse in a storm. I don't remember my mother reading to us often but I do remember that she would leave magazines and books around the house open and turned upside down to save the page. Woe to anyone who messed with the book and lost her place. You could get sent up to bed for a nap for that offense. I knew then that books were very important and that only when you were bigger could you read them yourself. I could hardly wait to be big enough. My father used to read aloud to us and he had a wonderful voice. At dinner my mother and father would trade literary quotes and it became a game that all of us kids learned to play also. I am so glad that you enjoy reading and that your children are learning the joys of what is contained in print.

[patricia]

Reading was my great release as a child, and as an adult there is still nothing better than getting lost in a book.

My son and I read from Chapter books almost every night and it has become a very special and dear ritual for me. I delight in the fact that we will be forced to remember our constant sharing of stories. He LOVES being read to, and frequently has vocabulary questions, which make me absurdly proud.

We've read Beverly Clearly quite a bit, but have also spent an inordinate amount of time on Harry Potter. L, loves magic, and looks quite a bit like Harry - brown hair and glasses.

L is very attracted to comedy time travel and we've had a good time with the Magic tree House series, and the Time Warp trio, which I find a little irritating, but fun.

Half magic by Edward Eager (a classic) is a good one too.

[meg]

My older son is 4 1/2 and I have not attempted chapter books with him yet. My friend started with Stuart Little. Someone else thought maybe a Ramona book. I may try one of those but if you have a suggestion for another one to begin, I would love to hear it.

[Lisa V]

I read Trumpet of the Swans to the girls about 5 years ago. Loved it. Read Summer of Monkeys by Wilson Rawls, lesser known than his Where the Red Fern Grows, but a better book.

I have read all the Little House Books, from the board books to the story books based on the books to the chapter books to the kids. The girls love them. We have had many a Halloween with girls dressed up like Laura and Mary. We even considered go to the Laura festival one year when we were driving cross-country. But it just didn't work out.

[SheilaC]

I love your honest description of time management, and how your laudable plans sometimes don't quite work out. That's me too! And it's one of the unacknowledged privileges of being a SAHM, that you are free to procrastinate and waste time, now and then. It's also one of the drawbacks, for a procrastinator like me, and causes problems on a regular basis.

Anyway... I admire your devotion to reading long chapter books with elevated vocabulary with your kids. I enjoy reading aloud, but we most often choose picture books or shorter chapter books, with more accessible material. The problems you mention have held me back from reading the Little House books so far, and other more challenging books that confront death, or have "scary" parts. I keep telling myself that if Jody's kids like those stories, my gang will enjoy them too, but I'm not always so sure.

In any case our kids started reading just around their 5th birthdays, so the library selection altered to a lot of easy readers, and we re-read all of their old favourite board books too.
I still read aloud to the kids from more advanced books. But today was more typical - we got 33 picture books and early chapter books from the library this morning, and the kids went on a reading binge all afternoon. They have read 10 to 15 books each, by themselves, and I only helped read 3 bedtime stories.

DH and I are total bookworms, and our kids (so far, touch wood) are following in our footsteps. I understand when they won't come for lunch until they finish the book they are reading, and ignore everything I say to them, but it's really annoying!

And you know, six year olds are not exactly trained in literacy pedagogical methods. So give yourself credit for learning to read at an early age. Clearly you were bright and interested, and paid a lot of attention to the words on the pages, and you learned to read without much teaching. Cool! Hope it will work just as easily for your kids when they are ready.

Must go check your LibraryThing now!

[Moxie]

Carosgram, I leave my books open and down to save the page, too. I don't know anyone else who does that. And it drives my husband to the brink.

We almost started "Farmer Boy" with El Chico, but in the first few chapters there's that whole section about the gang of 16-year-olds who've beaten the teachers so they don't come back. And the whole scene with the blacksnake whip. I didn't think a 4-year-old was ready for that. So my husband read him Charlotte's Web instead.

[Sandra]

Thanks for that link about the Osage. That is an amazing article.

[Sandy]

Oh, I can identify with so much of this post - the time spent reading blogs, the rainbow colors of reading books program (I got to be in the gold level, which I think was the top, then they didn't know what to do with me), and the chapter classics.

I never liked the Little House books so much, though. My favorites were "A Secret Garden" and "The Little Princess" and Jean Craighead George's "My Side of the Mountain".

[Madeleine]

Jody, I relate to this post so much. I read it yesterday afternoon, after going over the drugstore list to confirm that none of it was *really* needed that day, so I could read "just one more." And before checking the grocery list to see if I could keep everything in the trunk during daycare pickup. No. Too warm for the frozen/dairy stuff. So I didn't comment then, ran off to shop instead. But first I needed some energy for the racing around that my procrastination creates, so I ate some chocolate. Way to go with the "get back in last summer's clothes" effort. So big hugs, and if I fall off the blog-earth one day you'll know why!

[liz]

Try the Shoes books by Streatfeild on your kids when you're done with the Little House books. I think they'll love them.